Irrelevant keywords reported in Webmaster Tools

[Chexone]

Howdy,

My top keywords, according to WMT, are keywords that appear on my pages, but are far from being what my site is about. We have user-generated content, and so each page has a little bio of the person who is providing the content. The labels in the bios are what is showing up as top keywords.

Example: education

On the page it may say something like "Education: Bachelor's Degree". And so google thinks we're a site about education.

Short of removing the labels from all pages, is there anything else I can do? And even if I do remove the label, google will then think my site is about "Bachelor's Degree".

Thx!

[goodroi]

this sounds like you might have a bad case of blog spam. whem google wmt reports irrelevant keywords i often find the source is from hackers you added hidden text or blog spam. either way i remove it since it is not content that my users will find useful.

[Marvin Hlavac]

Could you remove the entire "Education: Bachelor's Degree" from the view of unlogged uses, and leave it there only for logged in members to see?

[BenFox]

I may be wrong but I thought that the WMT top keywords were the terms that are generating the most traffic to your site and not based on semantic analysis (unlike the Google AdWords tool suggestions).

[aakk9999]

@BenFox
Perhaps you are confused between the
"Your site on the web" ==> "Keywords" section and
"Your site on the web" ==> "Search Queries" ==> "Top queries" tab

Since the OP said:

..keywords that appear on my pages...

I assume he refered to "Your site on the web" ==> "Keywords" section of WMT.

[Chexone]

I assume he refered to "Your site on the web" ==> "Keywords" section of WMT.

That's correct.

I guess I could hide the non-pertinent keywords from my pages for non-logged users (ie bots), but then, isn't that a subtle type of cloaking?

[tedster]

If you're getting good traffic from Google, then my instincts say just ignore this report. I have ignored it in several cases with major clients - with no ill effect. You probably risk more by tinkering than by just letting it go.

[bumpski]

I don't know why IFrames are so maligned, I love em.
This is a tip I actually hate to give up.

Put the "Bios" each on their own separate page. You probably had a DIV wrapped around your Bios anyway. Make sure there is a "noindex" metatag on each Bios page. Then integrate that page in your original page with an IFrame. For IE you'll want to set the IFrame to ALLOWTRANSPARENCY and probably no borders etc. ALLOWTRANSPARENCY will let your original page's background show through. Unfortunately this is not standards compliant (I'm not sure what IE does these days). Of course there are more details to this.

Google does not index IFrame content presented in this way, but it does follow links through IFrames. The IFramed page can certainly be on the same domain; probably best if it is.

I certainly wouldn't mess with cloaking, when IFrames are readily available and ideal for the job. Even better the IFrames render asynchronously!

Sometimes you might have navigational menus that could end up looking like keyword spam, put them on their own page and then IFrame them with a noindex meta-tag. What's important about this is Google can still "see" the content of the page, see it's not meant to be spam, and is informed it shouldn't index the content. Look but don't index!

Iframes really are the standards compliant, HTML way, of doing an "include" of text you don't want to duplicate, and, without using server manipulations.

[tedster]

I sometimes use graphic versions of commonly repeated interface text. It's another option to consider.

[Chexone]

Awesome info guys... thanks!

[BenFox]

@aakk9999 Thanks for pointing that out. I've never used that report before.